Kevin Scanlon

My son is home from college, visiting briefly before he goes back for his summer session, so I've been making a concerted effort to cram as much writing as I can into limited working hours each day, so my evenings are free to spend with him and the rest of our family. This weekend, my wife and I took him out to dinner, where I found myself in front of a Centipede arcade machine, drawn there by the unmistakable sound of the player earning an extra guy.

Something caught in the mental driftnet, and I began to reel it in. "I have to play this," I said, doing my best not to be as manic as Richard Dreyfuss behind a pile of mashed potatoes.

They looked at each other, warily. "Okay..." my wife said.

I dropped a quarter into the slot, felt the trackball fit comfortably beneath my right hand, and began to play. By the time the first flea dropped, I'd retrieved a childhood memory from the early '80s.

Arcade games - the actual cabinets that took actual quarters - were ubiquitous throughout my childhood. After about 1978, you couldn't walk into a fast food restaurant or convenience store and not find one.

Kevin Scanlon

"Yeah, let me just finish this," I said, typing as fast as I could, my fingers and brain in a familiar creative race.

"If we don't leave right now, we're both going to be late," she said.

I glanced at the clock: 3:15pm. "Oh shit. Okay, I'm getting up now."

I told my brain to take the ideas it was releasing and hold onto them for about two hours. My fingers and brain wanted to know who won the race, and I told them both that I didn't have time to invent one of my trademark conversations between things that can't actually converse. They didn't protest.

Though I wanted to stay at my desk and keep writing, I grabbed my stuff off my desk, slipped on my shoes, and went to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. Anne had come up with a solid plan: She had an appointment at 3:30, and I had a voice over session at 4, just down the road. For only the second time in our life together, we could actually carpool to our respective engagements, and it would be convenient. I must admit, I was excited by the idea, not only because we were doing something nice for the planet and saving money on gas and parking. I was excited because I love to spend time with my wife, even if it's just an extra 30 minutes while driving somewhere.

Anne wasn't nerdy like me when we started dating, and she isn't nerdy like me, now. She's been nerd-adjacent for thirteen years, though, so she's picked up an appreciation for some of the things I'm always geeking out about, like, polyhedral dice and their role in dispatching fantastic monsters, the existence of three (and only three) Star Wars films, produced between 1977 and 1983, and why I get twitchy when people holding food get too close to my comic books. It's no big secret that I love my wife, but just in case it wasn't clear: I love that she gets me, and I'm grateful for that every day.

Kevin Scanlon

"I don't know why I think it's going to be different every time we come out to do this," I said, the last time we went out to hit the links.

"You're just upset because I'm kicking your ass," Anne said.

"Fucking Pagoda hole. That was bullshit. The volcano hole will be the great equalizer!" I declared.

She laughed as she teed up.

I looked around and tried to overlay my memory of this particular course over what I saw. My ponds were clean, my fountains were blue-tinted geysers, my little boats and seaside town didn't have peeling paint or broken windows. The carpet on each hole was smooth and pristine, and the arcade inside the castle behind us was filled with dozens of different video games and pinball machines.

"I can't separate how this place really looked in the '80s from how I want to remember it," I said. "I wonder if I've just idealized it, or if it really did look and feel fitter, happier, and more productive when I was a kid."

Kevin Scanlon

"What's that?" One of them asked.

"This is how we started playing video games at home when we were kids," I told them.

"Yeah, your uncle and I got this for Christmas in 1977," Anne said.

"Boy, you guys are so old," Nolan - who was 5 at the time - said.

"We are totally old," I said, not knowing that, ten years later, he and I would have to stop playing Frisbee in front of our house because I had "hurt my Old," when I tripped over the curb trying to catch up with one of his more powerful throws.

We looked at it together: Once-shiny silver switches jutted from the top of a sleek black body that was wrapped in faux woodgrain. Black rubber cords snaked around it, ending in the iconic joystick controllers that are woven tightly into the fabric of my youth. A cardboard box, its edges revealing the passage of time as clearly as its contents, sat on the floor beside it. Inside it, 20 game cartridges waited, keys to a time machine waited: Combat, Pitfall, Yars' Revenge, Space Invaders, Centipede, Missile Command, and Cosmic Ark among them.

Kevin Scanlon

The night before, while Nolan and I watched the Kings play like they couldn't wait to get to the golf course, and the people who paid to watch them at Staples center didn't really need to get their money's worth, he grabbed my cell phone off the coffee table.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Looking at your pictures."

"Oh. Okay. Just don't mess with any of my settings or anything, okay?"

"I won't."

Kevin Scanlon

PRO TIP: Get into the Kings now, because they're about one season away from being a great team that can seriously compete in the playoffs. All your friends will think you're ahead of the curve and you can charge them for hockey insights!

I've been in love with ice hockey since I went to my very first Kings game, at the Forum, during the magnificent purple and gold era in the early '80s. I was 13, and all I remember about that game was how bad the Kings played, how awesome the fights were, and how much I wished I'd discovered the sport earlier.

One year later, Star Trek made it possible for me to be a rabid hockey fan for the rest of my teens. I bought my first pair of season tickets in the 1987-88 season, and kept them until 1992-93. When I was a teenager and traveled to a different city almost almost every weekend to attend Star Trek conventions, I made a special effort to go to cities with NHL franchises, so I could see what it was like to watch hockey where the fans were as passionate as the buildings were old. Boston, New Jersey, Montreal, Calgary, even Hartford all provided memorable experiences, and I got to see some truly outstanding games over the years.

Kevin Scanlon

When I was six years old, I set foot onto on a T-ball diamond for the first time.

I was skinny, awkward and unsure of myself - basically a smaller version of the teenager I'd eventually become - and I didn't have very good coordination, but my dad loved baseball, and I knew that if my dad loved it, I loved it too, because that's the way things work when you're six.

It was the spring of 1978, when smog alerts were as common as reality shows are today, and hazy, reddish gold sunlight shone down on the field at Sunland Park. The sounds of other kids playing on the swings and in the giant rocket ship at the playground mingled with the smell of barbecue smoke as I stepped up to the plate to take my first practice swings.

My first swing connected with the middle of the tee. The baseball - in those days of gas lines and national malaise, we didn't have the soft RIF balls my kids got to play with - fell off and landed in the batter's box on the other side of the plate. The other kids giggled while the coach clapped his hands and shouted encouraging words to me as I picked the ball up and put it back on the tee.

I looked up and saw my father's expectant face through the chainlink fence near the dugout. I slowly and deliberately lifted my bat, held it out at arm's length, and aimed at the top of the tee with one eye closed. I stuck out my tongue and furrowed my brow. I tasted sweat on the corners of my mouth, and felt my heart beat in my ears.

Kevin Scanlon

"Behind the Container Store?" I thought when my friend Drew asked me if I knew anything about the place, and if it would be a good location for a Fark party. "There's something behind the Container Store? And it's not a dumpster filled with containers of dead bodies?"

I used the promise of dinner at Akbar, a fabulous Indian restaurant on the corner of Union and Fair Oaks, to convince my wife to go with me and scout around. After gorging ourselves on various Masalas and ka Salans, we went in search of the cleverly-named Olde Towne Pub.

Kevin Scanlon

I completely agreed, and spent much of the weekend thinking about some of my own favorite off-the-radar attractions. When I mentioned to my wife that I may write a column about some of those undiscovered places, she said, "Just because these places are undiscovered by you doesn't mean they're undiscovered."

Being a geek, I replied, "But until they are observed by me, they don't exist in my reality." Then, "Or, actually, the various locations both exist and do not exist, because -"

"Stop. Stop. Stop. You're getting geek all over me."

"Sorry. My bad," I said.

"I know. You can't help it."

I haven't been able to stop thinking about these places that exist for me, but may not exist for other people, so today, I thought I'd open the box and find out of the cat's dead or alive by sharing one of my favorite off-the-radar locations in all of Southern California.

Kevin Scanlon

It was time to do the annual calendar replacement, which is something I dread more than I probably should. To some people, it may not be that big of a deal - a calendar is just a place to write down appointments and reminders - but to me, it represents a 12 month commitment to a theme, and I want to ensure that I do not choose poorly.

This particular kiosk was fairly well-stocked, considering how close to Christmas it was, and my wife waited patiently while I invested more time choosing 2009's kitchen wall calendar than many people put into choosing a tattoo. Which is why I've never had a tribal barbed wire calendar, thank you very much.

I dug through the kittens and puppies and sexy models. I pushed aside countless sports teams, lamented that I've never been able to get into fantasy art, and finally decided to go for something familiar and reliable.

"Excuse me," I said to the bored teenage girl who didn't know how lucky she was to have a job, "I can't seem to find the Far Side calendar."

She stopped texting and gave me a look.

"There isn't a Far Side calendar," she said.

I laughed at her hilarious joke.

"Seriously," I said, "make with the Far Side calendar."

I desperately wanted to spend the entire day outside with my son, hiking up the Sam Merril trail, walking around the Rose Bowl, or playing frisbee in the street out front. But thanks to an unholy convergence of writing deadlines piled high around me, partly due to some poor planning on my part, but mostly due to a sudden explosion of OMFG DO THESE THINGS RIGHT NOW requests that dropped into my lap on Friday, I was stuck inside.

I wasn't going to complain; at a time when more and more people I know are losing their jobs and I'm starting to get survivor's guilt, I'm grateful to have enough work to keep me inside on a Sunday. Still, I sat in my chair and looked out the window, at one of the most beautiful January days I've seen in my 36 years riding Planet Earth, and felt the warmth of the sun on my face. I looked back to my desk. The TO-DO list was long and devoid of checkmarks. The blank document on my monitor was a perfect sea of white, disturbed only by an insistent blinking cursor.

I took a deep breath, and got to work. Nothing came easily, distracted as I was by the unnaturally perfect day that was just 25 steps away, but I eventually made my way through it all, and in the fading light of the afternoon, spent about ten minutes throwing the frisbee with my son. It was the best ten minutes of my day, and my only regret was that it didn't last longer.

Yes, you read that correctly.

"I think I'm going to lose to Britney Spears," I wrote back.

"You should write about it for your column," she said.

"Well," I thought, "I told Twitter that my conflicted feelings about the whole thing are too complicated for 140 characters ... sure, let's do that."

So now, without further ado, I present this week's column (Ha. I bet you thought you were actually reading this week's column all along! That's how I get you! I'm like a ninja, I am!)

Then I got married and had kids. My days got longer, my responsibilities grew exponentially, and the whole concept of free time became a memory so distant, I wondered if it had ever really existed at all.

I still cooked, but I had a new set of priorities. Instead of grabbing a cookbook and picking out a recipe that looked interesting, I had to ask myself: How long would this take to prepare? How much is it going to cost to feed two growing boys in addition to two adults? How likely is it that the kids I'm working so hard to feed are going to complain about the uniqueness of the meal I've prepared? Wouldn't it just be easier to order take out or throw something in the microwave?